Absolutely nothing – unless you happen to be a photographer trying to scrape every last ounce of quality out of your digital pictures.

Perhaps you’ve heard photographers talking about RAW, so what is it?  Let’s begin with the familiar JPEG format most digital cameras produce.  JPEGs do not contain all the information that registered on the camera’s sensor when you pressed the shutter release.  When you pressed it the computer inside your camera took the data from the sensor, applied white balance, sharpening, saturation, and several other variables to that image.  Then it applied compression using the JPEC codec which basically throws away data it considers to be superfluous to the image, which is why JPEG is described as a “lossy codec.”

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